How to be Your Company’s Cloud Champion in 2015

Implementing Cloud Infrastructure in the Enterprise is not easy. An organization needs to think about scale, integration, security, compliance, results, reliability and many other factors. The pace of change pushes us to stay on top of these topics to help our organization realize the many benefits of Cloud Infrastructure.

Think about this in terms of running a race. The race has not changed – there are still hurdles to be cleared – hurdles before the race in practice and hurdles on the track during prime time. We bucket these hurdles into two classes: pre-adoption and operational.

Pre-Adoption Hurdles

Pre-adoption hurdles come in the form of all things required to make Cloud Infrastructure a standard in your enterprise. A big hurdle we often see is a clear roadmap and strategy around Cloud. What applications will be moving and when? When will new applications be built on the Cloud? What can we move without refactoring? Another common hurdle is standards. How do you ensure your enterprise can order the same thing over and over blessed by Enterprise Architecture, Security and your lawyers. Let’s examine these two major pre-adoption hurdles.

Having a clear IT strategy around Cloud Computing is key to getting effective enterprise adoption. Everyone from the CIO to the System Admin should be able to tell you how your organization will be consuming Cloud and what their role in the journey will be. In our experience at 2nd Watch, this typically involves a specific effort to analyze your current application portfolio for benefits and compatibility in the Cloud. We often help our customers define a classification matrix of applications and workloads that can move to the Cloud and categorize them into classes of applications based on the effort and benefits received from moving workloads to the Cloud. Whether you have a “Cloud First,” “Cloud Only” or another strategy for leveraging Cloud, the important thing is that your organization understands the strategy and is empowered to make the changes required to move forward.

Standardization is a challenge when it comes to implementing Cloud Computing. There are plenty of Cloud Service Providers, and there are no common standards for implementations. The good news is that AWS is quickly becoming the de facto standard for Cloud Infrastructure, and other providers are starting to follow suit.

2nd Watch works closely with our customers to define standards we call “Reference Architectures” to enable consistency in Cloud usage across business units, regions, etc. Our approach is powered by Cloud Formation and made real by Cloud Trails, enabling us to deploy standard infrastructure and be notified when someone makes a change to the standard in production (or Test/Dev, etc.). This is where the power of AWS really shines.

Imagine… A service catalog of all the different application or technology stacks that you need to deploy in your enterprise – now think about having an automated way to deploy those standards quickly and easily in minutes instead of days/weeks/months. Standards will pay dividends in helping your organization consume Cloud and maintain existing compliance and security requirements.

Operational Hurdles

Operational hurdles for Cloud Computing come about due to the different types of people, processes and technology. Do the people who support your IT infrastructure understand the new technology involved in managing Cloud infrastructure? Do you have the right operational processes in place to deal with incidents involving Cloud infrastructure? Do you have the right technology to help you manage your cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale?

Here are some people related questions to ask yourself when you are looking to put Cloud infrastructure to work in your enterprise:

How does my IT organization have to change when I move to the cloud?

What new IT roles are going to be required as I move to the cloud?

What type of training should be scheduled and who should attend?

Who will manage the applications after they are moved to the cloud?

People

People are critical to the IT equation, and the Cloud requires IT skills and expertise. It has been our experience that organizations that take the people component seriously have a much more effective and efficient Cloud experience than those who might address it after the fact or with less purpose. Focus on your people – make sure they have the training and support they need to ensure success once you are live in the Cloud.

Processes

Cloud infrastructure uses some of the same technology your enterprise deploys today – virtualization, hypervisors, hardware, network, etc. The difference is that the experts are managing the core components and letting you build on top. This is a different approach to infrastructure and requires enterprise IT shops to consider what changes will need to be made to their process to ensure they can operationalize Cloud computing. An example: How will your process deal with host management issues like needing to reboot a group of servers if the incident originates from a provider instead of your own equipment?

Technology

Finally, technology plays a big role in ensuring a successful Cloud infrastructure implementation. As users request new features and IT responds with new technology, thought needs to be given to how the enterprise will manage that technology. How will your existing management and monitoring tools connect to your Cloud infrastructure? To what pieces of the datacenter will you be unable to attach? When will you have to use Cloud Service Provider plugins vs. your existing toolset? What can you manage with your existing tools? How do you take advantage of the new infrastructure, including batch scheduling, auto-scaling, reference architectures, etc.? Picking the right management tools and technology will go a long way to providing some of the real benefits of Cloud Infrastructure.

At 2nd Watch we believe that Enterprise Architecture (in a broad sense) is relevant regardless of the underlying technology platform. It is true that moving from on premises infrastructure to Cloud enables us to reduce the number of things demanding our focus – Amazon Web Services vs. Cisco, Juniper, F5, IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, etc.

This is the simplicity of it – the number of vendors and platforms to deal with as an IT person is shrinking, and thank goodness! But, we still need to think about how to best leverage the technology at hand. Cloud adoption will have hurdles. The great news is that together we can train ourselves to clear them and move our businesses forward.